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Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale
- jacquesm 17y agoAbsolutely amazing... thank you! Bobby McFerrin has some unique abilities, I didn't know that 'crowdhacking' was one of them. He turns a crowd of unrelated people into a musical instrument in less than 60 seconds, most impressive.
- maryrosecook 17y agoGosh, I'm sorry to post a contentless comment, but watching this just made me so happy.
- jacquesm 17y agoDon't worry, be happy ;)
- jbenz 17y agoI just heard this story yesterday: Several years ago, a friend of mine was going to see a Bobby McFerrin show at Ohio University. The day of the show, the student newspaper wrote an article warning everyone that if McFerrin heard a lot of shout outs requesting Don't Worry Be Happy, that he was very likely to storm off the stage and not return. Which if you think about it, Don't Worry Be Happy would have to be the most ironic possible song to cause a person to storm off. I guess the audience kept mum on the requests, because my friend says it was one of the best shows he's ever been to. And he's been to a lot. Note: coming from me, this is just heresay. I can't actually testify to Bobby McFerrin's hatred of Don't Worry Be Happy.
- jacquesm 17y agoInteresting anecdote. He wrote it in an hour or so because of being frustrated. I can imagine if you have 'great plans' and all people recognize you for is a thing that you whipped out like that it could get a little frustrating. The real compliment is in that his musical genius is such that he could even do that. There are other examples of that, I think that such huge popularity of a thing you whipped out in a short time causes people to think of you as a 'one hit wonder', and I'm sure that is not what Bobby McFerrin is all about.
- jedc 17y agoHe's actually a tremendously talented musician and singer. It's a bit non-traditional, but one of my favorite classical CD's is where he sings the violin solos for various pieces. Link to album "Paper Music" is here: http://www.amazon.com/Paper-Music/dp/B00138KNZA/ http://www.amazon.com/Paper-Music/dp/B00138KNZA/
- jcl 17y agoThat's one of my favorites as well. For all the tracks marked "Voice", he's using his voice as a solo instrument, but not singing words. The description sounds cheesy, but the result is surprisingly effective -- simple and haunting.
- mixmax 17y agoIt appears that music is a preinstalled program in humans.
- sp332 17y agoBefore some Greek dudes put nice-sounding musical scales on a mathematical basis (octaves and other music theory concepts), music was either re-creating sounds from nature or stylized talking. It took a lot of experimentation and observation to find a musical system that consistently "resonated" with human emotion.
- eru 17y agoI don't think so. The Greek ideas have just survived, because they wrote a lot and their conquerors --- the Romans --- spread their stuff. Other cultures had well-developed music, too.
- carbon8 17y agoNo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_music http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_music
- bkovitz 17y agoAre you sure about this? Can you post a reference? My understanding is that the same sorts of scales (logarithmic, with any frequency f and f*2^n treated as equivalent pitches, usually with five or eight tones per octave, occasionally more) have arisen independently in just about every human culture, usually without a mathematical theory. I could be wrong, though.
- chrismear 17y agoThis makes about as much sense as claiming that before people figured out how to write and before linguists started codifying systems of grammar, all language was just unstructured simplistic animal utterances.
- dpnewman 17y agoCouldn't have said it better. The irony of the pre-eminenct, western-only centered historical-musical view surrounding a McFerrin melody is thick as molasses. It's West African in rhythm, choral response, scale and spirit.
- zach 17y agoMuch cheaper and more entertaining than the giant floor piano from "Big." I don't want to say the word "crowdsourced," and yet, I just did.
- SwellJoe 17y agoCheaper only if you have ready access to a couple hundred people. I'd hate to try to fit that instrument in my home studio.
- hugothefrog 17y agoHow timely! At lunch today a couple of colleagues were talking about the ability to play a note just by feel and intuition, on whatever musical instrument you are proficient in. And here we have a man who can play a crowd!
- michael_dorfman 17y agoI thought you were going to say it was timely because George Russell, inventor of the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization died this week.
- jcl 17y ago...which reminds me of the Dave Barry article about the professor who discovered that basketball fans universally chant "air ball" in the key of F: http://archive.deseretnews.com/archive/print/430672/AIR-BALL-CHANT-SENDS-MESSAGE-FROM-THE-STARS.html http://archive.deseretnews.com/archive/print/430672/AIR-BALL...
- bitdiddle 17y agocute!
- WilliamLP 17y agoI wonder if he's ever had an audience that hit the chord properly when he spread his legs out on 1-3, and then what he would have done with that!
- jerf 17y agoIf someone was really interested in turning this into performance art, I strongly suspect that it wouldn't have taken more than another 10 seconds to tell half the audience to follow one leg and half the other.
- Aron 17y agoI think even more interestingly, if he had simply repeated the attempt a few times I think the audience would have self-corrected.
- tumult 17y agothat's not a full chord, it's a major 3rd interval.
- WilliamLP 17y agoThat's a battle of pedantry that you lost a long time ago, and you will win it sometime after "begging the question" gets used correctly most of the time. It's a good example of a picky use of language that adds nothing whatsoever to the understanding of the subject. "Interval" has connotations I didn't want, namely that it's the same no matter what degree of the scale you start on. I really did mean "I, III" specifically. As far as I know, there's no term in music for that, but "chord", namely a major I chord (only without the fifth) seems to fit what I wanted to say better than "interval" to me.
- tumult 17y agowhy? that's the right term for it. it's not anywhere close to a major I chord without the fifth! never underestimate what other kinds of nerds you may encounter in the wild :]
- dpnewman 17y agoIncredible pedagogical demonstration. Rapid learning via call-response, game-like interaction. Beautiful thing... web apps could gain some inspiration from this for UI teaching as well.
- chrismear 17y agoHere's a good five-minute segment from Howard Goodall's 'How Music Works' series, talking about the human universality of the pentatonic scale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpvfSOP2slk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpvfSOP2slk
- r00k 17y agoIf you enjoyed this video, check out this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Bstv5z-Ow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Bstv5z-Ow It's him doing the same thing, but longer, and with more interesting soloing over it. This one's a proper piece.
- arketyp 17y agoI happened to catch this video on Reddit yesterday and there was a thread with some illuminating insights: http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/962oj/bobby_mcferrin_demonstrates_how_our_brains_are/c0bjmy6 http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/962oj/bobby_mcferrin...
- jamesbritt 17y agoBut it sounded more like the heptatonic scale, no?
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoNo, I think he just went over two octaves, so some notes were repeated.
- jamesbritt 17y agoSounded to me that he started on C, bounced around C D E, then toggled over B and C, then back to the dance over C D and E. And then later dropped down the lower register. (I'm guessing at the actual pitches; starting with C as a reference for the intervals.)
- dphiffer 17y agoRadio Lab on music: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21 http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21
- hc 17y agoBah
- autarch 17y agoI was really impressed with this, and sent it to my wife, who pointed out that it's not all that impressive. If you watch, McFerrin gives the crowd 4 out of 5 pitches _first_. Assuming he starts on C, he gives them C-D-E, and then A. He also makes a point of making a bigger leap from C to A (a minor third) from between C-D-E (each a major second). At that point, it's hard to see how the crowd could come up with anything _but_ a pentatonic scale! He's given them four notes, and established that a small jump is a major second and a big jump is a minor third. So when makes the big jump from E to G and the crowd follows along it's not all that magical. If he'd just given them C-D-E and made a small step stage left, would they have gone for B or Bb instead? It's still a fun little performance to watch, but I don't think it proves anything about the pentatonic scale being hardwired into the human brain.
- extension 17y agoHe gives them three notes, they figure out the other two and extend the scale across two octaves. For a room full of laypeople watching a guy jump back and forth, that's remarkable. Now, in this day and age, anybody who hasn't been raised by wolves has had the pentatonic scale drilled into them from the day they were born. Also, it's not an arbitrary bunch of notes. It's derived from simple harmonic principles. Still, I would not have guessed that this stunt would be possible.
- autarch 17y agoAh, you're right, he doesn't give them E. However, my point remains the same. He gives them C and D. The audience comes up with E, which is totally natural for a _major scale_! Then McFerrin gives them the A (with the big jump). At that point the audience is either forced to go with A minor or a pentatonic scale. Considering the fact that he has established two jump sizes (minor third vs major second), it's pretty much impossible for them to choose A minor.